Taylor Swift ‘Loses Her Balance’ In ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ Video

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Those words come from a softly punked-out and slightly dazed Taylor Swift, in the two-minute-long spoken-word flashback at the beginning of her latest music video, “I Knew You Were Trouble.”

“The worst part,” she goes on to say, “wasn’t losing him, it was losing me.”

Wise words from young Taylor, who as we all know has been through a few relationship ups and downs of her own

In the video, Taylor is shown initially waking up alone at what appears to be an empty festival ground. No one is around, including the person who had been her companion–who we, of course, already know is “trouble.”

That person is played by Reeve Carney of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark fame. The video then proceeds to show the whirlwind relationship the two of them had–the ups, the downs, the all-the-way-arounds. Throughout, Taylor is decked out as some sort of lost-soul, hippie-punk Coachella princess.

The character she depicts in the video is a free-spirited gal who is initially thrilled with the joyride of her relationship with picture-perfect Reeve. Of course, that doesn’t last, and she quickly comes to realize that what she had bought into wasn’t such a fairy tale after all.

The final wake-up call, of course, is getting abandoned (“lying on the cold hard ground” amid streamers, dirt, and trash) at a music festival.

“As soon as I started writing this song, I knew it was different from anything else on the record, so I knew I wanted the video to be different from anything we’d done ever done,” Swift told MTV. “I wanted to tell the story of a girl who falls into a world that’s too fast for her, and suffers the consequences.”

The video was directed by Anthony Mandler, who’s created music videos for many pop-rock artists including Rihanna, Drake, Muse, Justin Bieber, John Mayer, and Lana Del Rey (who’s latest Mandler-directed video for “Ride” shares some of the dreamy, extended-narrative qualities of “I Knew You Were Trouble”).